


Like the Sea Washes Towards the Lonely Pier

by mystery_deer



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Jon is trans too but it doesn't come up I just want to let you know, M/M, Martin is depressed, Mother Issues, Peter Lukas here is less making Martin depressed and more encouraging him to wallow in it, Peter and Martin's relationship is nebulous, Self-Esteem Issues, Trans Martin Blackwood, Trans Peter Lukas, Unhealthy Relationships, but like...not GOOD comfort, focuses way more on Peter than Jon but Martin still thinks about Jon, literal wet dreams, sometimes depression entities that love you can be something that's actually deeply personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23045602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystery_deer/pseuds/mystery_deer
Summary: Martin Blackwood is promoted as the assistant to Peter Lukas, acting head of the archives.Martin Blackwood's mother dies.His biggest concern is that he can't seem to write poetry anymore.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Peter Lukas
Comments: 7
Kudos: 36





	Like the Sea Washes Towards the Lonely Pier

Peter appeared after Martin's mother died.

He stepped out of the suddenly uncertain air, a man of fog and gentle static.  
His voice was soft, everything about him was soft and shifting.

“Hello.” He said. “You’re my assistant, Martin, right?”  
“Ah..yes." Martin said, slightly startled. He felt lost in a haze of grief and relief and hatred. "Yes, and you’re…”  
“...Peter Lukas.”  
It was hard to get words from him those first few weeks. He spoke like a man unused to conversation. 

He acted like a man unused to being spoken with instead of spoken to.  
He would smile too long or change his inflection in the middle of a sentence to make it more cheerful, his cadence rising and falling rising and falling like ocean waves.

Martin wished he had time to write poetry.  
But everything he wrote turned to End Of Days or Mother Love.  
Mother.

His mother had died with him holding her hand and he could feel her recoiling as he did.  
He hadn’t squeezed it.  
He had barely even touched her skin and yet she flinched and soured and closed her eyes after smiling at the nurse who asked her if she wanted water, as if seeing him - as if his face would be the worst image to take with her to the wherever that lay beyond.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT SHE REALLY THINKS OF YOU?  
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT SHE REALLY THINKS OF YOU?  
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MARTIN?  
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?  
DO YOU WANT TO?  
DO YOU WANT TO?  
MARTINMARTINMARTINMARTINMARTINMARTINMARTINMARTIN

“It’s so much more peaceful to be alone, isn’t it?” Peter said, stepping out of the space behind him. 

His voice was like a cool balm, soundproof earmuffs against the two syllable alarm-blare  
MAAAAAAAR TIN  
MAAAAAAR TIN  
An unpleasant foghorn interrupting his waking sleep.

Even Jon’s voice was there sometimes, neither the hot-knife needle in an apple trick voice of Elias (Did you want to know Martin? Did you want to know deep down?) or the catatonic do nothing cold of Peter’s.

Jon’s voice is water.  
Sometimes Martin could drift on it with his eyes closed, listening and listening.  
Sometimes it filled his lungs.  
He sank.  
He drowned.

‘I think you were lonely too’  
\- By Martin Blackwood, raised without company  
Is the only phrase he’s written in months.

He’s started to hear Peter’s voice even when he’s not there.  
The first thing Martin thinks is ‘Poor Jon, if this is what being marked is then poor Jon.’  
Then he laughs until he cries.  
Has Jon ever thought Poor Martin?

Yes.  
Yes.  
Dozens of times.  
Poor stupid Martin.  
Poor fat Martin.  
Poor unloved Martin.  
Poor Martin.

‘Nothing is my own.  
Not even my face.  
I borrowed it,  
And I borrowed badly.’  
\- By Martin Blackwood, son of somebody

He dreams of Peter.  
He is swimming in the ocean as Martin watches from the boat.  
Well, swimming...not quite swimming.  
He is floating just below the water, so his body is visible, visibly still.  
His arms are at his sides and his eyes are fixed on the sky above.  
Not Martin.  
Jon’s eyes are watching Martin from somewhere above the clouds.  
Just below and Just above him, Just out of reach.  
Poor middle Martin.

When Peter climbs on board Martin can see water drip steadily from the coarse hairs of his sex.  
The water doesn’t stop.  
“Don’t dream about me.” Peter says, propping up his leg and scratching at his beard.  
The water doesn’t stop.  
It’s all clear and cool and Martin knows that to drink it would quench every thirst he’s ever had.  
And Martin knows he’s going to fuck it up.  
Knows the second his lips touch it it will turn to wine or beer or something else intoxicating but unclean.

“Didn’t you hear me the first time?” Says Peter, on his knees, head resting on Martin’s thigh.  
His hair is wet and it dampens his jeans.  
There is nothing for Peter to take out.  
Nothing for either of them.

He wakes up thirsty and wet.  
He goes to work lonely and Peter hums around the office for half an hour before stepping out from whatever curtain he has concealing himself from the universe.

Peter isn’t Jon but they’re both shit at conversation.  
It’s comforting being the most socially adept person in the room no matter who he’s talking to.  
Because he only talks to two people now.

The difference, he decides, between Peter and Jon is that Peter would say he doesn’t like the poems Martin writes and Jon would pick them apart line by line.

Peter’s love is a comforting blanket of at best ambivalence.  
There's nothing personal about his vague dislike, no attack in the way he laughs when he catches Martin's eyes full of want.  
"I can't give you anything." Peter tells him over and over again. "Because there's nothing to give."  
It's the least personal thing in the world.  
It makes him feel awful.  
But at least he’s there.

“Peter.” He says to the seemingly empty office. “If I ask you to go to dinner with me would you go?”

The next day Peter’s arms wrap around Martin’s torso as he listens to a man’s voice shiver with fear describing how everyone is doomed including (most definitely) him.  
“Not on time.” Peter’s voice says from somewhere other than his body.

And even that hope is lonely.  
It hurts.  
But it feels good to hurt from somewhere inside, doesn’t it?  
That’s why he liked poetry.  
Still likes it.

He asks Peter to write a poem for him.

‘The wind is strong.  
The wind turns sails.  
All hail  
The lonely  
Sailor.’  
\- By Peter Lukas, questionably poetry

When Jon asks him how his poetry is going the first thing he wants to do is scream.  
He doesn’t like not being around Peter, he dulls everything.  
Peter is pain killers and Jon is alcohol.

“The burning means it’s working.” Says his mother’s voice from somewhere, face made shadow, hair haloed by light.

Her hair is the same color as his.  
But he dyed it in college and there was nothing left of her, he guesses.

“So you’re going to be a boy now?” She’d asked, eyes sliding off him like he was an inconsequential part of the scenery.  
“I’ve always been a boy.” Martin had said. He’d written so many poems by then, all with the name - Martin Blackwood written neatly and proudly at the bottom.

“Oh.” Said his mother. “Well.” And that was that.  
She’d called him Martin,  
Called him her son,  
And she became a stranger to him.  
What had she been before?  
How old was he?  
Had she ever looked at him and not seen double?

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT SHE REALLY THINKS OF YOU?

“You can be whoever you want when you’re alone.” Peter tells him, massaging his shoulders and not letting him turn to see his face. 

“But no one’s there to see it.” Peter's breath is always cold and his tongue, the one time they'd kissed like that, had been cold in the way Martin's got when he ate ice.  
There was never anything warm or passionate between them.  
He thought of Jon's eyes, burning. So bright he couldn't stand to meet them.  
“Do you need others to see you to be you?” Asks Peter.

Martin looks at his hands and wonders if his father’s dead too.  
Jon’s father is dead.  
His mother too, poor Jon.

Poor Martin and Jon, says a voice that might have been his own if he was prone to viciousness.  
Poor Martin and Jon, with their dead moms and their dead friends and their dead love that never even began.

You were born alone and raised alone and will die alone, in Peter’s loving arms.  
He loves you like you love air. Unthinking and unappreciative.  
Which he?  
Jon or Peter?

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT HE REALLY THINKS OF YOU?

“I have to go.” He ends up saying, turning and walking before he can see Jon’s face change and hate him for it.

He doesn’t want to be the type of person who hates other people.  
But he is and he does.  
He doesn’t want to hate Jon.  
He doesn’t.  
And I think you’re afraid of that, says Peter says Elias says Jon says his mother says him.

Maybe he is prone to viciousness.  
And how could he not be?  
Tim told him once that he was a teddy bear,  
(When Tim smiled)  
He’d laughed and said in a cutesy voice “I just want to pinch your little cheeks!”  
(When Tim hadn’t been bits and pieces on the rubble left behind)  
And Martin had hated him a little bit then.  
But he’d smiled and said Thank You.

Poor soft Martin.

“Peter.” Martin breathed, lying on the floor of the office with his eyes closed.  
“Peter.”  
“Peter.”  
“Peter.”

“Please don’t call for me.” Said a voice that slowly wrapped itself around a body. 

“Peter if no one sees us or hears us or calls for us are we really here?” He whispered frantically, near tears. Peter’s soft static wrapped around him and he was numb again, he sighed in relief.

“When people did see you, hear you, call for you - did you feel any better?” Peter responds after a few minutes, lifting Martin’s hand and bringing it to his face. His skin was cold as clay, inhuman and unreal.

Martin thought about his mother who looked at him and saw someone else.

Thought about his classmates who laughed over every word he spoke so the only way he could say anything was to write it down and hide it.

Thought about his friends who called him soft and cute and gentle, saw his teddy bear skin and never saw the worms writhing in the cotton.

Thought about Jon who told him he was dumb and bumbling and a drag on the team and then - suddenly - asked him in a voice so sweet, so tentative, so...wanting. About his poetry.

He closed his eyes.  
His heart ached.

“No.” He admitted. And then, “Peter, it hurts.”

The other man tsked and kissed his throat as chastely as one would kiss the hand of royalty.  
Everything dulled and dimmed and numbed.

Everything but the loneliness was too loud.  
Everyone but Peter had never really wanted him anyway.

“That’s how you know it’s working.” Said a voice without a body.  
And then the voice was gone too.

And Martin’s tears were lost to the lonely.


End file.
